Hi,
One thing is clear, Aditya has a thick skin, which sadly still seems to be
a quality required in many open source projects including ours. I wonder of
many old-timers would enjoy the kind of reception he got here after
introducing himself as a GSoC student -- even by people that know well what
is to be an intern or a mentor. As a community, we should do better.
To the point of the thread, we can have a discussion about extension
ratings featured at
mediawiki.org while
wikiapiary.com enjoys the feature
and users start using it there. We can even reject the feature altogether
if this is what we want. This GSoC project, like all GSoC projects
accepted, has explicitly avoided any deployment on Wikimedia servers
lacking support from the related maintainers / community. Aditya just wants
to get further with his project.
Now, let's continue discussing user ratings as they could be implemented in
a first iteration at
mediawiki.org. Remember, the goal is to have a proper
catalog of extensions, something that today we sorely miss (and thank Jamie
for
wikiapiary.com).
For those interested in the process of proposing and accepting internship
projects, here you have a post mortem of this specific case:
On Tuesday, August 19, 2014, Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This sounds like a serious miscommunication before the GSoC project
begun. Something for the
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Lessons_learned
page, perhaps?
Perhaps, but what is the lesson we need to learn?
Let's look at the history of this project:
* The first idea was proposed in the "Possible projects" on February 2013
by Maria Miteva, as part of her FOSS OPW internship --
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mentorship_programs/Possible_pr…
* Between March and April 2013, we fine tuned the proposal as "Research &
propose a catalog of extensions", Yuri Katkov volunteered as mentor, and we
moved it to the Featured section, and we created a report in Bugzilla --
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mentorship_programs%2FPossible_…
&
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46704
* During 2013, this project idea was featured in one GSoC round and two OPW
rounds before, but candidates didn't pick it.
* In January 2014, at the Architecture Summit, I had a chat with Mark
Hersberger and Markus Glaser, aka MediaWiki release management team, where
we decided to keep polishing this project at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ExtensionGallery , and they volunteered as
mentors.
* This brought some discussion to the Bugzilla report and the wiki talk
page. We also reached out to Jamie Thingelstad from
Wikiapiari.com, a great
service that we already link to in our extensions pages.
* This time we got students interested. Aditya Chaturvedi was the first one
reaching to us (as early as February) and he started drafting his proposal
publicly by March --
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Adi.iiita/Gsoc2014
--
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-March/075378.html
* The fact of having students interested helped us narrowing the project.
We decided to focus on implementing user ratings in Wikiapiary and finding
a way to make that data exportable so
mediawiki.org or whoever else could
make use of it. We explicitly left out of the scope of the project any
changes to
mediawiki.org.
* Aditya got some feedback during the review process but actually nothing
(that I recall) criticizing the focus on user ratings. Then he was
accepted. The he started to work under the supervision of Mark and Jamie.
You can read his reports at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Adi.iiita/Gsoc2014/Report
... And now Aditya is about to finish his GSoC project (looks like
successfully), having followed our processes as they were designed and
having accomplished the goals initially set. In the first place he deserves
our congratulations and gratitude. The we can discuss what are the best
next steps in the direction of improving
mediawiki.org.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil